Qaeda Threat For Elections Leads to Plan For High Alert

By DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: September 28, 2004

Al Qaeda's intention to carry out an election-year attack inside the United States has been confirmed by recent intelligence, but the threat information does not indicate any time, place or method of attack, senior administration officials said on Monday.

As a result, counterterrorism agencies will move to a higher state of alert in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 election and will remain at an increased state of readiness through the 2005 presidential inauguration, the officials said in a background briefing. Those efforts include additional steps to deter a possible attack.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is re-examining terror cases for fresh leads and is interviewing, and in some cases, re-interviewing, possible Qaeda sympathizers in the United States, the officials said. A new directive outlining these steps was sent on Monday from F.B.I. headquarters to the bureau's 56 field offices.

The Homeland Security Department has contacted the National Governors' Association to determine what kind of help states might need to secure polling places. Transportation safety officials expect to increase dog patrols at airports and train stations. The Coast Guard will increase the number of vessels to be boarded for inspections.

''We will be putting on a full-court press over the next five or six weeks,'' said one official, asserting that the intelligence indicates that the threat of possible attacks remains as high as when officials first disclosed it in May.

Another official said: ''Nothing since then has changed our assessment received in the spring. Nothing has changed, but the window is narrowing.''

Even so, the officials cautioned that there was no information that would provide fresh insights into the group's operational plans. ''There's no new specific pieces of information in the stream,'' one said.

The briefing was given by senior officials who have access to a wide variety of highly classified information and analytical reports about terrorist threats. The briefing appeared to be an effort by counterterrorism officials to announce that the government was taking additional precautions before the election, without creating the impression that a broad new antiterror campaign is about to be undertaken in response to a heightened threat.

The officials seemed to be trying to avoid missteps of the past when heightened terror warnings have sometimes led to complaints by Democratic lawmakers that the Bush administration had exaggerated the terrorist threat at critical moments for political motives.

There were other indications that the government was ratcheting up preparations for the election. Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. conducted a telephone conference with the heads of the bureau's 56 field offices telling them to re-examine terrorism cases for fresh leads.

Speaking at the briefing, one administration official said the F.B.I. was trying to cultivate fresh sources and seek assistance, ''especially from the Muslim community.''

In part, the measures are a follow-up to the threat announcements in August when officials of the Homeland Security Department said that the arrest of several Qaeda suspects in Pakistan, and later in Britain, had led the authorities to laptop computers that contained reports of sophisticated surveillance operations at five financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington.

That inquiry led investigators to thousands of computer disks and other documents that officials hoped might reveal previously unknown Qaeda activities. But the cache of computer disks has not produced the hoped-for breakthrough.

At the briefing, a senior official said that the surveillance operations, which were carried out mainly in 2001, were no longer thought to be part of the election-year threat, in contrast with statements by officials in August who said that the planning might be related to the current threats.

Still, the investigation of the financial institutions has produced several investigative leads regarding people, phone numbers and credit card transactions in the United States, counterterrorism officials have said.

Some intelligence analysts express doubt about how to interpret Al Qaeda's election-year threat. Some believe that the heightened security measures may have already forced the terror network to cancel or postpone plans for an attack this year.

Others hypothesize that Al Qaeda may still be planning to carry out the threatened strike, using personnel who have managed to elude detection, perhaps by living quietly and legally in the United States, like the September 2001 hijackers. In part, the analysts have said, the concern of the unknown is behind the new steps being taken.